"It's called a Forest Wagtail," says local birder and photographer Chris Watson.

"It's from a different family to our Willy Wagtail...this bird is more common in the broad leaf forests of Thailand and Cambodia and that part of the world."

The backyard sighting marks the first time the Forest Wagtail has ever been recorded on the Australian continent, and it's causing plenty of excitement in the birding world.

"These birds are sort of short distance migratory birds and they'll come down in Winter maybe as far as Indonesia," says Chris.

"In the case of this sort of vagrancy, they might get a bad wind and they just overshoot their target destination - this one's just a little bit more mind bending because normally you'd expect a vagrant bird to land in Darwin or Broome."

The discovery began when Chris was called to a friend's guest house in suburban Alice Springs.

Will Cormick, owner of the guest house and a fellow twitcher, had seen the bird but was having trouble identifying it.

"I knew it was pretty certainly a bird that wasn't in the Australian bird books, so I had a good look at it, I thought it was a wag tail but I didn't recognise which wag tail," he says.

"And so began a good hour of hide and seek as the little bugger walked casually around the garden. At first he was a bit flighty, so we retreated..."

"He came back towards us and walked right up to within about seven metres of me, but always managed to keep shrubbery, cyclone fence or miscellaneous garden clutter between us." (From Birds Central, Chris Watson's blog)

"I wasn't actually aware of what I was looking at," says Chris.

"I was vaguely aware that it wasn't from here but I had to put some photographs on Facebook and get some opinions from some other more learned people than me, they're the ones that eventually told me what it was."

The discovery of the Forest Wagtail in the Red Centre is already making waves in birding networks across Australia and Chris says twitchers from far and wide are already en route to Alice to see if they can spot the bird.

"A friend of mine is driving down from Katherine," says Chris

"He's a tour guide - he was on a tour, and he just left all his passengers out in the bush, jumped in his car and he's barrelling down the Stuart Highway at high speed!"

The next step is to get it officially registered but Chris says there's no doubt about the species.

"We've got an organisation called the BARC [Birds Australia Rarities Committee] which is a group of about a dozen of the top ornithologists and scientists in the country," he says.

"It'll be subject to some taxonomic reviews but it will get added to the [Australian] list because it's a pretty safe identification."

Chair of BARC and ornithologist Tony Palliser agrees.

"I've seen the photographs, it all looks convincing...it would be almost a zero chance of being an escapee or an introduced species," he says.

Tony says the last recorded sighting of a vagrant Forest Wagtail was on Christmas Island, off the coast of Australia, in 2009.

"The record that occurred on Christmas Island was of a similar time [May 17th]...this one has just gone the extra mile at the same time of year!"